I made SHERRY'S CRISPY ORANGE-SESAME CHICKEN yesterday and it was AMAZING.

We have been trying a new recipe a week for several months and have found many good ones. But this is the first one worth making sure I came back to comment on. Everybody LOVED it and several people exclaimed "this is a KEEPER" after one bite. There was tug of war on who got to take the one serving of leftovers for lunch today.

The chicken was moist and flavorful. The breading was crispy on the top and sides.

Notes on minor modifications. Turned out we didn't have sesame seeds at the last minute for the breading. However the sesame oil in the marinade still gave it a hint of sesame taste and it was still totally yummy. We look forward to making it again with the seeds.

We used Sweet Red Chili dipping and all-purpose sauce (Thai Kitchen brand) for the 1 tsp Thai chili sauce. You can taste a bit of heat in the marinade but with this sauce there is no "heat" in the final product. Which was good for us since my mother doesn't like hot spicy. But if you want spicy heat you should pick something stronger. Though I will again note the FLAVOR of this was excellent.

Our chicken breasts were not small. We got them on sale for 1.99 a lb but they came big. Each breast half ~ 8 oz. This recipe did the full 2 lbs of meat without any problem. We cut them in half before serving. So we got 8 servings out of the two pounds of meat.

We used a ziplock bag to pound the meat in ... and did the pounding with a rolling pin. Excellent idea to make the meat uniformly thick. I think it really helped keep meat all moist since it was all done at about the same time. I am going to do this from now on with all our baked chicken breast recipes. Our breasts ended up about 1/3-1/2 inch thick uniformly. Which made them large and flat. We fit the four of them perfectly onto the aluminum foil lined cookie sheet. And we picked a larger orange so we had about 7 slices to place around the pan and partially on the chicken in places.

Don't skip the orange slices. They are a wonderful added taste to the meal in addition to being pretty.

We paired this with baked carnival squash ... a sweet winter squash... it was the perfect side dish. Sweet enough that the meat and squash complimented each other wonderfully without either overpowering the other. Some people put brown sugar on their squash but I thought it was perfect with just a bit of butter (or butter spray).

As a bonus I toasted the seeds (with a bit of salt and spray butter) and had them out on the table as an appetizer pre-meal snack. They got gobbled up. So that worked out well too.

We also served steamed broccoli to round it out.

Overall it was healthy, tasted fancy and yet was not overly pricey on a per meal basis. The sesame oil and Thai Chili sauce where a big outlay price wise up front but you don't use a lot. So when we make this again (which we will many times) it will diminish the per recipe price down to very affordable. And the marinade was so delicious I think we will be using it for other things.

For example I am going to try the marinade on Salmon next week... and set aside some to baste it with while cooking and then just sprinkle sesame seeds on the last 5 min or so and then broil for a few moments and skip the breading part.

Thank you so much for submitting this Sherry Monfils. It was a blessing.